Bloggers Help 'Hunt' Down Vodafone Customers

Last year, I wrote about an online scavenger hunt ASICS created that targeted online bloggers in England, Germany, Italy and France. Bloggers were sent one half of an object; their goal was to scan the blogosphere for information to help them find the remaining half.

Recently, Vodafone wanted to promote its latest phone, the Vodafone 360 Samsung H1, especially the product's social networking navigation. The phone allows users to view friend updates from social networking sites via a single click to their contact list, as opposed to logging in to each site or installing specially designed apps.

Vodafone felt that consumers would be leery about participating in an online event created and sponsored by a big brand, so the company reached out to 15 bloggers in the Netherlands to design their own "You Flick in my Hyve Face" Chase, an online treasure hunt.

That name incorporates a snippet of social networks used throughout the chase and easily accessed via Vodafone 360: YouTube, Flickr, LinkedIn, MySpace, Hyves (a Dutch social media site), and Facebook.

THEY and Achtung! came up with the strategy for this campaign, which used no paid media.

"Concepting the campaign took just a couple of days, then a few weeks of planning and approaching the bloggers," said Dylan Berg of THEY. "At first we were just going to write the chases themselves, and ask the bloggers and online influentials to help us promote it. But then the idea evolved and we decided to let the bloggers write and host the chases themselves."

Each chase began with a clue strategically placed online that led people to other clues throughout Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. The first person to find all clues received a Vodafone 360 Samsung H1.

In total, 28 different chases were created by bloggers who cover lifestyle, music, gadgets, mobile and entertainment genres.

These bloggers were not paid to create and design the chases. These events, however, did drive large amounts of traffic to their Web sites. More than 27,500 people participated in the treasure hunts.

Aside from the telephone prize, many bloggers gave additional gifts from their sponsors/partners, such as a new pair of jeans and concert tickets, according to Berg.

"It took between 6 and 15 minutes for people to finish a chase," said Berg. "Some of the first bloggers made the clues too obscure," so the company stepped in "to make sure the bloggers made the chases accessible enough that people would be motivated to try to finish the chase."